Sales Numbers Aren't Matching Amazon (How to Verify the Accuracy)

Overview

SoStocked uses your Amazon API from your Seller account to get your sales data. But Amazon's reports are in UTC time zone. So use this video to verify the numbers and build trust into your reporting.

Why Your Sales Numbers In SoStocked Aren't Matching With Amazon

If you've ever noticed that your sales numbers being reported in SoStocked differ slightly from what Amazon Seller Central is telling you what your sales were for the same day, you might get a little confused. So SoStocked has an API that pulls datafrom Amazon every day and the reason why this happens actually has to do with time zones.

Time Zones

Here is a screenshot of an image that shows you the different time zones on planet Earth. Amazon's API and most of their reporting use what's called Universal Time Coordinated (UTC) as you can see here in the center. This used to be referred to as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) -- we'll just call it UTC for now. Now, just to give you some idea how this works, when it's noon UTC time, it is 3 am inPacific Standard Time (PST). If you've logged in to Amazon Seller Central recently and you're in the US, you might notice how pretty much everything is reported in PST yet the reports that we get from the API are recorded in UTC -- so that creates a difference of several hours.

There's nothing we can really do about that reporting, but there is a way that you can at least verify -- actual numbers within a 24-hour period are verifiable. So on your Forecast page, copy an ASIN.

Now, go to your Orderspage, then click on the Customer Orders dashboard -- this will pull up all of the orders from your seller account.

Paste the ASIN that you've copied here in the search bar up here, and this pulls up a list of all of the orders for this one ASIN.

Now, go ahead and click the Export to Excel button.

Once you're inside of the Excel spreadsheet, click on row 1, then click on the Data tab at the top, then click on the Filter tab, and it should give you a filter at the top of each of your columns.

Go to the Status column and click on the down arrow button.

Then, deselect Cancelled but make sure that Pending and Shipped are still checked so that we're only looking at the pending and shipped orders.

The next thing we're going to do is to go to the Date Purchased column and click on the down arrow button.

Then, sort it in descending order so that the top date is on top and it's going back in time.

Now, what we're doing is we're verifying -- so we're going to highlight all of the sales going back for a period of time.

In this case, I highlighted all of the cells in the column for the past 15 days -- so basically from 3/15/21 to 3/29/21.

Then, we added them all up -- Excel does that for us, it just gives us a Sum. We sold 60 units in the last 15 days and we want to find the average so 60 divided by 15 is 4.

Now, come back into SoStocked and go to your Forecast page. Go to the product that you're verifying and click this number right here.

Then, scroll down to this area and make sure that all these tools -- Trend, Sales Spikes, Deep Discount Sales, and Stock Outs --are turned off temporarilybecause these are like additional sales that would be added on top of your velocity.

As you can see, the 15-day average is basically 4.

Now, log in to your Amazon Seller Central account. From here, go to Reports, and then Fulfillment.

Go to Sales, click the show more, and click on All Orders.

So what we're doing is we're requesting a report for all sales for a particular period of time -- in this case, I suggest going for the last 30 days because we're looking at a 15-day report.

Then, click on Request Download and as you can see, it says "In Progress" so you'll have to wait a few minutes.

Once it's done downloading, you'll have the Download button right here. Click the Download button, then it will open up a txt file, and copy all of it.

Now, go ahead and paste all of that data into an Excel spreadsheet. Once you've copied all that information over from the txt file, you're going to want to sort it a little bit. Essentially, all we're doing is we're going to compare the report that we got earlier to this report that we just got from Amazon Seller Central.

Go to the ASIN column, and click on the down arrow button.

Now, we're going to search for the ASIN so we just copied and pasted that in here and we're just filtering so we're only looking at that ASIN.

Now, we want to look at only the item status " Shipped" and "Unshipped" -- we don't want to look at Cancelled orders.

We're now going to compare the same date range -- so in this case, the 29th going back to the 15th.

If we add up the number of units sold which is Column L in this case, we can confirm that it is also 60.

So we can confirm that thi s4 units per day average is in fact correct.

If you have any trouble with this, feel free to reach out to us at [email protected]. We're happy to help!